Building Solidarity with
Iraq's Civil Resistance
A Report-Back from the Zenko Conference by Bill Weinberg
Thursday, October 4th at 7:00 PM
Suggested Donation: $7 - $10
Award-winning journalist Bill Weinberg will give a report-back from an
international conference on building solidarity with the Iraq Freedom Congress (IFC)
held in Tokyo this past summer. The IFC is a coalition of trade unions, women's
organizations, neighborhood assemblies and other civil society groups which have
come together to oppose the U.S.- led occupation and demand a secular government
in Iraq. The IFC is leading a campaign against the pending law that would
privatize Iraq's oil, and has established self-governing zones, which both
occupation forces and sectarian militias are barred from accessing, in
neighborhoods in Baghdad and Kirkuk. Recently, their leaders have been targeted
for attack by U.S. forces. The Japanese anti-war group Zenko last year raised
$400,000 for the IFC to start its own satellite television station, Sana TV,
which began broadcasting in April. Can anti-war forces in the U.S. similarly
organize effective political and material support for Iraq's civil resistance?
Bill Weinberg is, author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles
in Mexico (Verso 2000), and editor of the on-line World War 4 Report
(http://ww4report.com).
He also co-hosts the weekly Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade (http://www.morc.info),
an anarchist variety show, Tuesdays at midnight on WBAI, 99.5 FM in New York
City.
Sponsored by The National Organization for the Iraqi Freedom
Struggles
The National Organization
for the Iraqi Freedom Struggles (NO-IFS)
is a coalition of
individuals who have come together to oppose the U.S. war against Iraq by
supporting the secular, democratic, and progressive movements in Iraq that are
struggling for freedom against the occupation and against the Ba'athists and the
political Islamists, who aim to impose a theocratic state on the Iraqi people.
NO-IFS supports Iraq’s civil resistance, which champions the rights of women,
workers, national minorities, and GLBT people and fights for a non-sectarian and
multi-ethnic society. NO-IFS advocates that the antiwar movement as a whole
adopt this approach to ending the occupation – active support for Iraq’s secular
and democratic freedom struggles against both the U.S. occupation and terrorist
reaction. This type of solidarity is a central way to build and sustain our
movements here. It is only with a principled commitment to human freedom and to
people struggling for freedom – not by explicitly or tacitly supporting a
supposedly "lesser evil" – that the antiwar movement will flourish.
This talk will be held at TRS INC. Professional Suite
44
East 32nd Street, 11th floor (between Park and Madison Avenues) New York, NY
10016